Gel air fresheners have existed for decades and are generally comprised of a mixture of natural and/or synthetic polymer, water, and fragrance that is solidified as a gel mass within a dispensing container. Such containerized products are formed from a hot liquid mixture that is poured into the dispensing container where the liquid mixture cools and gels. Such air fresheners are found in a variety of forms. For example, a gel air freshener may be provided in a simple open top cup-like container having a foil top that the user peels away and discards. Such a container is useful in providing a replacement cup of gel air freshener that fits within an institutional air freshener dispenser. Other systems may feature a foil and plastic laminated film wherein a non-permeable layer is peeled away and discarded leaving behind a permeable membrane layer still covering the product. In this way, a fragranced gel is exposed to the air to fragrance a room even though the air freshener mass cannot be physically touched. This system has been successfully employed in “gel-electric air fresheners” for many, many years. Larger weight gel air fresheners intended to operate at ambient conditions (i.e., passive gel air fresheners) may be solidified within a container comprising a base portion and a cover where both the base portion and the cover contain a substantial portion of the total solidified mass of air freshening gel. In such systems the cover is not completely removed and discarded because this would expose too large a surface of the gel product at once. In these systems the cover is instead pulled up from the base only to the extent that exposes the surface of product needed to fragrance a particular space. An exemplary product with such a displaceable cover is the Renuzit Adjustable® Air Freshener by Dial (Henkel). This conical shaped product features an axially displaceable cover that is “adjusted” in height to expose the fragranced gel mass to the extent desired. However, pulling up the cover of a brand new product is problematic because it is difficult to get the gel mass to release from the inside surface of the cover. The consumer has to assert force against a seal that was created when the hot liquid product, (initially poured through an access port in the top of the cover/base assembly), subsequently cooled within the assembled package. Although a jar of jelly may be thought of as having a vacuum seal that the consumer needs to overcome to remove the lid, the product (i.e., the jelly) is not contained in the closure, and therefore the product does not bind the closure to the container. Aside from the particular example of Renuzit Adjustable® containerized gel product, container systems having axially displaceable covers are found mostly in the food, beverage, and pharmaceutical markets, but only to the extent that the displaceable cover is simply a closure that does not contain any product itself.
Such closures usable to seal food, beverage, and pharmaceutical products in containers often feature closure assemblies based on coordinating lugs and cams rather than complementary screw threads. Lug and cam/hook/latch closure systems for containers offered many improvements over the traditional screw-thread closure arrangements. One improvement was that a lug and hook arrangement provided a child-resistant closure where the lugs of the closure cammed down and locked under complementary hooks or latches circumferentially spaced around the container neck. Another improvement was that a container closure could be designed to “snap on and thread off” from the container, thereby simplifying manufacturing. Also, the advent of tamper-evident closures required lug and cam arrangements that would cause a band to break away from the closure as the closure is unsealed from the container.
As indicated, the prior art has focused primarily on the need to seal closures to containers and to provide either tamper/child-resistance and/or tamper-evident features. But the prior art has been primarily concerned with containers and closure systems where product resides only in the container and not in the closure. That is, the prior art does not consider the situation where a solid gelled mass of material is solidified into both the container and a larger closure/cover where the cover also contributes to the available volume of the overall container. What is entirely absent in the literature is a way to adapt a lug/cam arrangement to assist in the unsealing and displacement of a cover from a container base where both the cover and the container base contain solidified material that has internally sealed the cover to the container base and has adhered to the inner surface of the cover.